Ancient Russian Church with 22 Exquisite Wooden Domes - A Stunning Masterpiece
According to legend, when the church was completed the builder cast his axe into Lake Onega, saying: "This church was built by Master Nestor... there was never one to match it nor ever shall be."
The slate grey waters of Lake Onega are most forbidding in rough weather, when the north wind lashes them into icy waves that roll over rocky shallows and myriads of tiny islands.
Here and there you can see striped navigation buoys — the sole inhabitants of these bleak parts. Nearly all water transport stops when the wind reaches as little as force four. The fishing boats and small motor launches stay moored securely at the landing stages and even large passenger boats do not venture out to the more remote villages.
The north wind drops very suddenly, usually towards evening. The foam-flecked waters gently rock vessels at their moorings, and in the west a crimson strip of warm sky glimmers faintly on the horizon, a sure sign that the weather will be fine tomorrow.
In summer the nights are always light and serene after a storm. The tranquil iridescent surface of the lake gleams with a shimmering light from somewhere overhead. On such nights you can hardly make out the beacons on the buoys and the winking beam of the lighthouses. The low-lying forested banks, the skerries and the countless islands are shrouded in a magical northern twilight.
The misty morning lake is still sharp with the chill of night and you wait a while before going out on the damp deck, but all your hesitation vanishes as soon as a silvery pyramidal outline appears slightly blurred behind Hay Creek. As you draw closer the pyramid seems to resolve slowly and two smaller ones detach themselves from it. Then the sun's rays suddenly burst forth and the roofs of the churches with their slender cluster of aspen domes spring into clear relief. We have arrived at Kizhi Pogost.
From a distance it looks as though the buildings are rising straight out of the lake, but as the boat moves nearer you can see an elongated, low-lying strip of slightly undulating island. There in a tight cluster are the breathtakingly beautiful Church of the Transfiguration with its twenty-two domes and the ten-domed Church of the Intercession with a tent-roofed bell-tower in between them. The wooden fence around the pogost stands on old moss-covered boulders. The combination and interplay of onion domes, steep barrel gables, and intricately carved stairways and porches create a truly magical picture.
As early as the fourteenth century the lands adjoining Lake Onega formed part of the Onega pyatina, an administrative division of the Novgorod republic. The lake lay on the route to Novgorod's possessions on the White Sea coast. At that time it was customary fo several dozen settlements to be grouped together under an administrative center, or pogost as it was called. The pogost was the place where fairs and festivals were held and it also contained the main parish church and cemetery. It frequently served as a defensive outpost, particularly if it lay near the boundaries of the Russian state.
The main building in the pogost was always a tall church usually placed on high ground so that it could be seen far and wide and serve as a landmark for travelers. As well as being the place where religious services were held, it was an important assembly point for the whole parish. The inhabitants of the surrounding villages used to attend meetings in the church and on the square outside. It was from here that bands of armed warriors set off to defend the Russian lands, and here the people celebrated their victories over the foe. The churches were repositories for important official documents and sometimes for the parish coffers.
Since the whole life of the parish was centered round the church, it was customary for all the inhabitants of the neighbouring villages to take part in building and decorating it. The local craftsmen put all their skill and energy into the work.
The Kizhi Pogost of Our Saviour on the northern end of Kizhi Island was an administrative centre of this kind and by the fifteenth century its jurisdiction extended to more than a hundred villages. There was nothing unusual about the fact that the pogost was on an island because all the villages in its parish were also scattered about on numerous small islands, and boats were the most convenient, sometimes the sole form of transport. The Kizhians used boats for fishing and hunting, traveling to the haymaking and the fairs, and taking a baby to its christening or a young girl to her wedding.
It is difficult to say exactly what the Kizhi Pogost was like in those far-off days. When Novgorod became annexed by Muscovy at the end of the fifteenth century, the trade routes passing through Lake Onega to the White Sea lost their former importance and by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Transonega area had become a remote backwater of the Russian state.
Frequent armed incursions into Karelia by Germans, Swedes, Poles and Lithuanians forced the inhabitants of these parts to fortify the main pogosts in Transonega. A timber stockade with squat watch-towers was erected round the Kizhi Pogost towards the middle of the seventeenth century and seems to have survived until the nineteenth. Academician N.Y. Ozeretskovsky, a Russian naturalist who journeyed around Lake Onega and Ladoga in 1785, has left us an engraving of the Kizhi Pogost surrounded by timber walls with two tent-roofed towers flanking the entrance.
The present stockade was reconstructed when the buildings of the pogost were restored in the 1950s, after a study had been made of the remains of old fortifications in other pogosts on the northern borders. The main entrance and the walls were modelled mainly on those of the Ilyinsky Pogost on Lake Vodlozero, and the gates in the north and east wall were designed on the same lines as those in the Pochezero Pogost.
Sixteenth-century records tell us that there were two wooden churches on Kizhi at that time — the Church of the Transfiguration and the Church of the Intercession.
The main parish church, the Church of the Transfiguration, had a tent roof and was destroyed by fire in the 1690s after being struck by lightning. The present tiered, multi-domed church of the same name was built in its place in 1714. As the Kizhi parish was the centre of a large area with a considerable number of parishioners, its churches had to be capable of accommodating big congregations. The building of large churches presented certain technical difficulties because the dimensions of the basic log frame were determined by the length of the logs and a number of other factors peculiar to wooden architecture. The builders solved the problem by erecting an octagon, instead of the usual rectangle, which made it possible to extend the area of the main body of the church considerably. At the same time they added four rectangular extensions or arms to alternate sides of the octagon, linked with the main body of the church by wide openings.
The ground plan of the Church of the Transfiguration was by no means new in Russian architecture. The octagonal plan with four arms was used in church building as far back as the fourteenth century. References to these earlier specimens are found in the chronicles.
The famous example is the Church of the Assumption in Veliky Ustyug built by the Novgorodians in the fourteenth century and destroyed by fire in 1489. The chronicle tells us that it was "wooden and most tall" and that the new church erected in its place was "cruciform not like the old one". Tradition was so strong that the inhabitants of Veliky Ustyug protested against this innovation and the architect was compelled to build a church "with twenty walls like the old one", that is an octagon with four rectangular extensions (the octagon counting as eight walls and the four extensions as another three walls each). This was possibly the main type of plan in early Russian church architecture. Churches of this kind were topped with tent roofs.
While adopting this traditional plan for the Church of the Transfiguration in Kizhi the builders and carpenters also developed and enriched it. The Kizhi church, with its remarkable unity of composition, represents, as it were, the highest peak of wooden architecture in old Russia. According to legend, when the church was completed the master-builder cast his axe into Lake Onega, saying: "This church was built by Master Nestor . . . there was never one to match it nor ever shall be."
The church really is a masterpiece with its fascinating combination of complexity and simplicity. You can stand and gaze at it for hours on end. It looks as if it has been carved out of a single block of wood, and when you see it for the first time it is difficult to tell whether you are looking at a building or a piece of sculpture.
It is particularly striking just before dawn when the building is still shrouded in a northern twilight. Everything from the central column of three octagons to the rich cluster of domes seems to be soaring upwards. The domes are emphasized by the bulbous curve of the barrel roofs rippling from the rectangular extensions to the octagon and up to the majestic central dome. Thanks to this interplay of forms which produces a clear pyramidal outline, the builders managed to retain the dynamic quality characteristic of tent-roofed architecture. This single building combines, as it were, all the technical and artistic accomplishments of many generations of unknown craftsmen.
The individual details are also very beautiful. The builders lavished a great deal of attention on the decoration of the huge double stairway which not only led up to the church's main entrance, but was also used for large communal gatherings. The boards running along the edge of the roof over the stairway and porch are perforated and have scalloped edges. The posts supporting the roof of the porch and stairway are carved in a kind of bead and reel design. This carving makes the stairway and porch stand out against the simple log structure of the vestibule. The steep angle of the stairway paves the way for the dynamic composition of the church as a whole.
Climbing up to the porch you have a splendid view of the vast stretch of the lake dotted with green islands. From here you enter the low-ceilinged vestibule dimly lit by tiny square windows and then pass through a small door into the main body of the church.
One would expect this huge, 35-metre-high building to have an equally lofty interior. In fact, however, although the inside is higher than the vestibule and fairly spacious, the ceiling is low by comparison with the exterior. This is the case with all wooden churches in North Russia, from the simple rectangular type to the more elaborate, multidomed ones.
The simplicity of the log walls, window and door frames, and carved edges of the benches round the walls blend perfectly with the rich painting on the ceiling and the iconostasis.
The so-called "sky" ceiling is a common feature of northern churches. It consists of a system of radial beams with the lower ends slotted into the walls and the upper ends sloped slightly upwards towards the centre and clasped together by a wooden hoop. The areas between the beams are filled in with triangular boarding. Only the Transonegan churches have painted ceilings. Unfortunately the painting on the boards and hoop of the Church of the Transfiguration was destroyed during the Second World War and all that remains today are the foliate patterns on the beams.
The original iconostasis outshone all the other decoration in the church by virtue of its intricate form and beautifully blending colours. The present iconostasis is of carved gilded wood and belongs to the second half of the eighteenth century.
The icons of the three upper tiers were replaced when the church was restored in 1759. The finely carved vine pattern that covers every section of the iconostasis not taken up with icons probably belongs to the same period. This abundance of gilt, together with the elaborate carving and the bright colours of the later icons is out of keeping with the style of the interior. On the back of the iconostasis one can still see the old squared and painted beams which formed horizontal ledges on which the icons were placed. They show that the original iconostasis was a four-tiered one with large icons over two metres high in the top tier.
Only ten of the icons dating back to the time when the church was built have survived, and they belong mainly to the lower tier which was reserved for icons of locally revered festivals and saints. They were the work of Transonegan painters and the best ones are St. George with scenes from his life, SS Zosimus and Sabas with scenes from their lives, the Dormition, and the Old Testament Trinity with Deeds.
All these icons are marked by a strong narrative element, simple drawing, precise outlines, and subdued colouring. They contrast strongly with the sumptuous canonical icons of the Moscow school in the early eighteenth century. The local Transonegan painters were far from the main cultural centres of Russia and rarely received instruction from the more celebrated masters of their time. They learned their art from everyday life and the harsh, majestic northern countryside.
It is interesting that the icons in these parts abound with saints who were revered as the patrons of certain trades, animals, birds, etc. SS Zosimus and Sabas, the patron saints of bees, and SS Florus and Laurus, the patron saints of horses, were particularly popular.
Icons were put in stables, cattle sheds, and barns, as well as chapels, churches, and homes. This explains many of the characteristic features of North Russian icon-painting, for example, why the icon-painter felt free to introduce decorative motifs found on peasant articles such as distaffs, birch-bark vessels, and national dress.
Careful study of the iconostasis in the Church of the Transfiguration shows it to be a kind of painted chronicle of life in North Russia. As we have mentioned earlier, the icon showing SS Zosimus and Sabas with scenes from their lives dates back to the time when the church was founded. The small pictures round the edge of the icon give a detailed account of the lives of these recluses on the island in the White Sea where they founded the Solovetsky Monastery. The scenes of ploughing, felling trees, and sailing are all depicted against a charmingly naive representation of the northern countryside with its gentle hills, fir trees, and the rough waters of the White Sea.
The Old Testament Trinity with Deeds also belongs to the same period. Its twelve marginal scenes narrating the story of Abraham and his wife Sarah contain many touches taken straight from everyday life. It is painted in ochre, vermilion, and gold. The use of vermilion is rarely found in icons of the Transonega region where the artists generally preferred a more subdued red which was made locally. The rich colouring reflects the same jubilant attitude towards life that we find in the architecture of the church itself, built at the time of Peter the Great's victorious Northern War.
A detailed study has not yet been made of the icons in the Church of the Transfiguration. They are extremely varied in style and clearly belong to different schools of Onegan icon-painting. It seems likely that separate groups of painters grew up in the larger villages, each with their own distinctive style.
A mere thirty metres away from the Church of the Transfiguration stands The Church of the Intercession built in 1764 . . .
To be continued . . .
Source: North Russian Architecture
One of the truly most magnificent wooden churches of the world. Master Nestor etched his heart's eye upon the earth in physical form. Thanks for sharing this post.
I have been blessed to actually witness this beautiful piece of craftsmanship. Thank you for sharing.